Re: Newbie with Wireless woes

To: misc_(_at_)_openbsd_(_dot_)_org

Subject: Re: Newbie with Wireless woes

From: Chris <cditri_(_at_)_comcast_(_dot_)_net>

Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 12:13:03 -0500

Okay!

Firstly, thank you all for your help. I would like to post what I have
done for posterity. I hope no one has to go through everything I went
through with this. (Using a US Robotics USR2410 802.11b wireless nic).

PROBLEM 1: The card did not seem to respond in any way no matter what I did.
SOLUTION: Firmware update was, in fact, necessary (As Todd guessed).

PROBLEM 2: Acquiring the firmware. Going to Intersil.com was a waste of
time (even though they made the prism2 chip). Wound up getting referred
to Connexant's website. Another dead end. Don't waste your time there
either.
SOLUTION: Finding the magical combination of words for a google search
to turn up this site: http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/ . Where
ever you are Jun, thank you!

PROBLEM 3: The page refers to a dos utility that it itself does not
host. It is a link or two removed from the site, and when you find it,
it points you to a broken link on the Hawking website. All subsequent
search engine searches seem to point to same broken link.
SOLUTION (sorta): decide to try linux utility prism2_srec to update
(figuring I can boot to knoppix).
PROBLEM 3a: Can't find that utility anywhere either, seems to be
referred to all over the web, but can't find download source. Rumor has
it that is in the HostAp suite, but I read the readme in that tarball
and did a find . -iname "*srec" and similar such things and did not find
it therein.

PROBLEM 4: Stuart was kind enough to find out where hawking was hoarding
its w110p.exe file. For future reference, it is here:
http://www.hawkingtech.com/images/drivers/we110p.exe . I tried many
variants on the hawking site (thinking the file might have been moved
rather than deleted), but that one escaped me. Thanks Stuart. Now that
I had the dos flash utility, however, it didn't work for me! It would
not detect my cardbus -- even when using the legacy.exe as suggested.
SOLUTION: As much as I didn't want to do this, I bit the bullet, and
did a win98 install. I dug up an old win98 disk, and borrowed another
hard drive so I wouldn't have to nuke my progress with OBSD. Well, due
to hardware problems, couldn't do that. So I *did* nuke my OBSD
install, installed win98, and all the drivers for that wireless nic.

ULTIMATELY, I wound up using the windows utility to flash the 1.7.1
(Utility complained about 1.7.4). Since I had it up, I confirmed that
it did work under windows. I nuked my win98 install, reinstalled OBSD
3.6, wrote a new /etc/hostname.wi0 that looks like this: